Pirate Bay Co-Founder Arrested in Cambodia

One of The Pirate Bay's co-founders has been captured in Cambodia while trying to avoid a jail sentence in Sweden.

The trials and tribulations of the world's most notorious file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, continue this week as the site's co-founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, who had disappeared after being found guilty of illegal file sharing in 2009, was arrested in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, according to various sources, including Swedish-language newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Warg, a native of Sweden, faced up to a year in jail and a hefty fine for his participation in the dissemination of 33 copyright-protected files. "His arrest was made at the request of the Swedish government for a crime related to information technology," Cambodia's police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told the AFP news agency. "We don't have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case."
The Swedish file-sharing Website was founded in 2003 and hosts magnet links to all sorts of media files, including popular films, video games and music. The Pirate Bay bills itself as "The world's most resilient BitTorrent site" and has survived numerous legal barrages, raids and changes to its technical architecture. The magnet links are used to reference resources available for download via peer-to-peer networks which, when opened in a BitTorrent client, begin downloading the desired content.

In May, a court in The Hague ruled that Internet service providers (ISPs) must block access to The Pirate Bay and that the Pirate Party has to stop publishing not only instructions on how to circumvent those blocks, but links to instructions, as well. The Dutch court ruled that Internet providers UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort must all catch up with the country's ISP giants, Ziggo and XS4ALL, in blocking user access to the site.

The recent ruling by the court in The Hague is an attempt to quash all that censorship-avoidance education. It comes following a complaint by the anti-piracy group Brein, a trade association that represents the Dutch recording industry and movie studios. Brein, which is analogous to the United States' Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trade groups, stands to profit from any fines levied against ISPs or groups such as the Pirate Party, since the verdict stipulates that fines be directed to the trade association.
"This is a slap in the face for the free Internet and a novel judicial decision," the Pirate Party said following the court's decision. "The judge decided to give the Netherlands another nudge on the gliding scale of censorship. More and more bits of the Internet will have to be censored because they might be used to get access to 'infringing' sites, until eventually most of the Internet will be unreachable."

Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.